Suddenly, a shot rang out! No, wait, it was a huge silver menorah, crashing
in through the main office window. It landed on Veronique's desk and bounced
to the floor, in the process knocking over and shattering the Swami's goldfish
bowl. "Aaah! Aaah!" shrieked Veronique. Colorful little fishes
flopped around on the floor. "Oooh, those poor little fishes!"
gurgled Lila Shook alarmedly. Claire White Light chose this moment to enter
the office from the stairs. "What in the name of Jove is all this,
then?" Claire was an officemate, a throwback hippie-chick mystic, an
aura-reader, and an old squeeze of the Swami's. Lila dumped a plant out
on the floor dirt and all, and took the pot and ran to get water for the
fishes. "My begonias! Oh no!" said Claire. "Save
the fishes! Save the fishes!" “The Swami's been kidnapped,
Claire." "Aaah! Aaah!" "Quite ze hullabaloo,
eh no?" added Louis B.
Scott was working up a powerful thirst for a few more Holy Ghosts by now.
Maybe several. There were no candles in the sockets of the menorah, but
there appeared to be a piece of paper folded into a cube and scotch-taped
into the center socket. After the broken glass, fishes, mud, and ex-begonias
had been somewhat attended to, Lila began prying the piece of paper out
with her Cross Classic Century Chrome Ballpoint, SKU#3502. "Wait.
Wait. Shouldn't we save it for fingerprints?" asked Veronique. She
had given up shrieking, at least temporarily. "What fingerprints?
We're not going to the police, remember?" "Oh... yeah. But
what are we going to do-oo!?!" marginally waily again. "We're
going to read the note, Veronique." Scott prided himself on being the
voice of reason in times like this. Confident, competent, the man behind
the wheel. Besides, it was the only way he could see to get to those Holy
Ghosts any time before sundown. The note was again hand-written, this time
with Mont Blanc blue/black ink in a modified Gothic script using a 1.5mm
italic, if Scott's eye didn't fool him.
Q: WHAT SORT OF THROPNOODLE DID THE SWAMI CROSS?
A: A. BELTING THROPNOODLE!
Uh oh. A. Belting Thropnoodle was a notoriously dangerous internet pirate,
hijacking websites by stealing other business's home pages and modifying
the credit card payment code to collect the money himself. He was reputed
to live on an impregnable island fortress in the Caribbean and have a
retinue of sycophants and myrmidons and a bevy of beauties to indulge
his every whim. Amazon.com, Mastercard, Land's End and American Express
did not want you to know about people like A. Belting Thropnoodle.
What could the Swami have done to piss off a powerful man like Thropnoodle?
What did they have to do to get him back? What did the "A" in
A. Belting Thropnoodle’s name stand for, anyway? And why a menorah?
"What are we going to do-oo!?!" Veronique, back to full throttle
again.
Suddenly, the door whammed open and a thick-set man in a cheap pinstripe
suit lunged in.
"Boss! Boss!" clearly one of Louis B's "boys".
"We caught dis little green guy. He trew a silver tree troo da winder!"
Two more goombahs with oft-broken noses and armpit bulges appeared in
the doorway, dragging between them a bedraggled leprechaun.
"Put up quite a fight, for a little guy." said one bodyguard.
"Got quite an arm on him, too!" said the other bodyguard.
"Oh, my, look at his aura..." said Claire White Light, "the
blues... the purples!"
"Let me read his irises," enthused Lila, "I've never done
a leprechaun before!"
"Aaah! Aaah!"
Scott Barton's day seemed to be declining precipitously, like a malfunctioning
runaway Jamaican bobsled. He stalked over to the 'chaun through the remaining
shards of broken glass and demanded,
"What do you have to do with all this? We can have you killed, you
know!" The bodyguards grinned their sharky grins, clearly pleased
at the idea of some action.
"Or even worse yet, heh, heh, heh..." Louis B's sibilant hiss
cut through the clamor in the room.
"I don't know anything! Some lady promised me a pot o' gold to do
it!" Aw shoot, thought Barton, the old pot o' gold trick again. Leprechauns
were generally pretty sharp, but they were suckers for that pot o' gold
at the end of the rainbow. Must be all the fern gas or something.
"You want we should make him squeal, boss?"
"I could tell from his aura if he's telling the truth...."
"You'll pay for those begonias, boy, one way or another...."
"Alright, alright," Scott on the case, "let's torture him
to find out who gave him the menorah."
"It was some lady, I promise. Please don't torture me, I'll tell
you anything you want."
"I'm sure you'll tell us anything you can to save yourself,"
Mr. B's hiss had no accent at all, "but what we want is the truth."
"No, honest! I have to tell you the truth, because leprechauns aren't
allowed to tell lies." Everybody knew this. The 'chauns were known
for being mischievous as all get out, but their distinctive moral code
prevented them from prevaricating on simple questions.
"O.K., so who gave you the menorah and told you to throw it through
the window?" Scott trying to stay on-task.
"Some lady, like I said."
"Dat boy's got an arm on him, I'll say dat much."
"O.K., so what did this lady look like? Was she short, tall, fat,
skinny, black, white, young, old, what was she wearing?"
"Well, she was tall," of course she was tall, thought Barton
irritably, everyone looked tall when you were 4'10", "she looked
kind of like Natasha...."
"Natasha?"
"You know, white skin, long black hair, foxy." "Rocky and
Bullwinkle" was a very popular show among the leprechauns because
Boris and Rocky were so short.
"What was she wearing?"
"Like, overalls, but short, you know? Like shorts with the top attached.
And spotted! Animal skin, spotted...."
"Like cheetah spots, giraffe? Snakeskin, leopard skin...."
"Yeah, leopard fur!" O.K., thought Scott, so we had a tall woman,
white skin, long black hair, wearing a leopard-skin jumper. The description
only fit about half a dozen women that Scott knew from the bar scene alone.
Vampire chic was "in" again this year.
Ever since the auto-clone procedure had brought all the endangered species
back from the brink, fur was “in” again too. Heck, with the
engineering they could do nowadays, you could even order a custom-built
leopard-skin housecat. Human cloning, in contrast, had received quite
a setback when it was revealed that Mick Jagger had secretly had himself
cloned back in 2002 by the same team that did Dolly the sheep. His five
duplicates formed a teeny-pop boy band called the Strolling Clones and
were currently at the top of the charts. All five were also currently
Cher's boyfriend. There were reputedly still some Michael Jackson clones
left over from his last attempt to have a normal family, but they had
"come out too black" for his tastes and were the subject of
a fierce court battle with the laboratory responsible.
"I can tell from his irises that he's telling the truth."
"Boy's got a heck of an arm on him, get dat tree troo da winder."
"We can't torture him! He's telling the truth." Claire the nurturing
earth-mother here. Barton could see that the girls found the leprechaun
cute.
"We weren't really going to torture him, that was just a threat."
"Eeet vuzz?" Louis B had recovered and was back to being French.
"Be a shame to mess wit dat arm."
All the Italian-Americans were thinking the same thing. In the great tradition
of Tommy Lasorda, Joe DiMaggio and Tony LaRusso, Louis B loved baseball.
He managed a fast-pitch softball team comprised of some of his restaurant
employees, bodyguards, bagmen and enforcers. Due to a woeful lack of good
pitching, the Hitmen had never advanced past the second round of the city
tournament.
"Hey, boy, you effer play zee bazeball?"
"Please don't call me 'boy.' Or, 'Shorty' or 'Junior' or ask me how
the weather is down here. I'm a grown man, and no, I haven't played zee
bazeball."
"Where youze get an arm like dat, den?" Bodyguard 1, the wide
one.
"We had a lot of practice throwing rocks at goblins in my home country,
I guess."
"Maybe now that we're all lovey-dovey friends here, we could shoot
the breeze over a few drinks?" Barton offered hopefully. "I'll
try to call the graphologist again and see if he'll meet us there."
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